the Chinese are coming

The

Chinese are coming, the Chinese are coming. At least that's what the world's travel operators, hotel companies and airlines are all assuming, and are in fact counting on to drive demand.

International tourist arrivals, a measure of actual bodies on the move, have jumped 30 per cent since 2003, to nearly 900m in 2007, according to the UN's World Tourism Organisation. Now the internet, low-cost airlines and rising Asian wealth are predicted to send the numbers really skyward. The UNWTO forecasts annual tourist arrivals will reach 1.6bn tourists by 2020, including 166m travellers from the Asia-Pacific region alone. These numbers are reasonably conservative: the forecast of 100m Chinese tourists, for example, suggests that just 7 per cent of the country's population will be travelling abroad, up from 3 per cent now. What if the actual percentage was 10?

The infrastructure is already being put in place. International hotel chains are salivating, announcing plans to open 854 hotels in the next four years in Europe alone. That would be an increase of 146,000 rooms, or 10 per cent, above what's already there, according to data firm Lodging Econometrics. Dubai should grow even faster: the 56,000 planned new hotel rooms by 2012 dwarf the 26,000 already open. Boeing, for its part, booked a record 1,427 commercial plane orders in 2007 and Airbus is counting on Asian-Pacific growth to fuel orders for its new super jumbo A380.

The real shortage is of things to see. The Sistine Chapel can squeeze in only a few hundred people at a time. In Paris, the Louvre accommodated 8m gawkers last year, up from 5.7m in 2003. But there is a limit. Even if the new Chinese tourists filed past the Mona Lisa at a rate of 100 per minute, on the museum's current opening schedule, it would take three years to funnel all of them through.